Guardian critics on the 2009 Booker prize winner, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall | Books | The Guardian The Guardian Books podcast Guardian critics on the 2009 Booker prize winner, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel's reimagined life of Henry VIII's fixer, Thomas Cromwell, has won the 2009 Man Booker prize for fiction. The Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armitstead, discusses the novel with John Crace and Sarah Crown Hilary Mantel is the clear bookies' favourite to win the 2009 Booker prize Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/Eamonn McCabe Tuesday 6 October 2009 16.54 EDT First published on Tuesday 6 October 2009 16.54 EDT Share on Messenger Close This year's Man Booker prize has attracted greater attention - and greater sales - than the award has seen for many years.

Claire Armitstead, John Crace and Sarah Crown discuss the merits of the winning novel, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, debating whether Mantel's portrayal of Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII stand up to scrutiny, if the judges passed over a more deserving winner, and how the bookies will feel about seeing the favourite waltz off with the prize for the first time in a decade. Topics Bookies' favourite Hilary Mantel wins 2009 prize for her fictionalised life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall Published: 6 Oct 2009 This year's Man Booker prizewinner, Hilary Mantel, talks to Sarah Crown about her triumphant novel, Wolf Hall, how she came to admire her scheming hero Thomas Cromwell, and why she writes historical fiction Published: 7 Oct 2009 Hilary Mantel has won this year's Man Booker prize with her fictionalised life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall. I'm delighted - are you?

Published: 7 Oct 2009 Booker Prize: Hilary Mantel on winning in 2009 for Wolf Hall - Telegraph Booker Prize Booker Prize: Hilary Mantel on winning in 2009 for Wolf Hall Man Booker 2012 winner Hilary Mantel recalls what it was like winning first time round in 2009 for Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel By Hilary Mantel 7:15AM BST 17 Oct 2012 In 1994 I brought out a novel called A Change of Climate, which was shortlisted for a small prize given to books with a religious theme. It was the first time a novel had got so far with the judges and I was surprised to be in contention. The main characters in my book were Christian missionaries. The winner was to be announced at a low-key gathering at an old-fashioned publishing house near the British Museum. I had never been to a literary party that was anything like this. Some of the invitees seemed to be taking, with shy simpers, their first alcoholic drink of the year. Conversation was a struggle; all we had in common was God.

After I didn’t win, I came out into the fine light evening and hailed a cab. What I felt was the usual flatness after a wasted journey; I told myself I hadn’t really expected to win this one. But as we inched through the traffic, a reaction set in. I was swept, I was possessed, by an urge to do something wicked: something truly odious, something that would reveal me as a mistress of moral turpitude and utterly disqualify me from ever being shortlisted for that prize again. But what can you do, by yourself, in the back of a taxi on the way to Waterloo? Wishing to drain the chalice of evil to the dregs, I found myself out of ideas. I could possibly lean out of the window and make hideous faces at pedestrians; but how would they know that it was my hideous face? They might think I was always like that. For a week or so, after I won the 2009 Man Booker prize for fiction with Wolf Hall, people in the streets did recognise me. They’d seen my triumph face, my unpretending grin of delight stretched as wide as a carved pumpkin. Sometimes they would burble happily at me and squeeze my hand.

On the train home one evening, a pale glowing woman with a Vermeer complexion, alighting prosaically at Woking, followed me through a carriage and whispered to me, leaving on my shoulder a ghost-touch of congratulation. All this was new to me. Before the Man Booker, I had trouble being recognised by a bookseller when I was standing next to a stack of my own books. Related Articles Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel: extract two 08 May 2012 I am a veteran of shortlists. I have served my time in the enclosures where the also-rans cool down after the race, every back turned, the hot crowds sucked away as if by a giant magnet to where the winner basks in the camera-flash. I have sat through a five-hour presentation ceremony in Manchester, where the prize was carried off by Anthony Burgess, then a spindly, elderly figure, who looked down at me from his great height, a cheque between thumb and finger, and said: “I expect you need this more than me,” and there again I experienced a wicked but ungratified impulse, to snatch the cheque away and stuff it into my bra.

After such an evening, it’s hard to sleep; your failure turns into a queasy mess that churns inside you, mixed in with fragments from the sponsors’ speeches, and the traitorous whispers of dissatisfied judges. Lunchtime ceremonies are easier; but then, what do you do with the rest of the day? Once, when I was trudging home from my second failure to win the £20,000 Sunday Express Book of the Year award, a small boy I knew bobbed out on to the balcony of his flat. “Did you win?” I shook my head. “Never mind,” he said, just like everyone else. And then, quite unlike everyone else: “If you like, you can come up and play with my guinea pig.” That’s what friends are for. You need distraction; or you need to go home (as I do these days when I lose) and defiantly knock together a paragraph or two of your next effort. At my third shortlisting, I did win the Sunday Express prize. At the moment of the announcement I thought that a vast tray of ice cubes had been broken over my head; the crackling noise was applause, the splintered light was from flashbulbs.

The organisers made me hold up, for the cameras, one of those giant cheques they used to give to winners of the football pools. I did it without demur. Did I feel a fool? No. I felt rich. How to conduct yourself as winner or loser is something the modern writer must work out without help from the writers of the past. As a stylist, you may pick up a trick or two from Proust, but on prize night he’d just have stayed in bed. As prizes have proliferated and increased, advances and royalties have fallen, and the freakish income that a prize brings is more and more important. Prizes bring media attention, especially if the judges can arrange to fall out in public. They bring sales, a stimulus to trade at a time when bookselling is in trouble. By the time I won the Man Booker I had scrabbled my way to half a dozen lesser awards, but in the Eighties and Nineties marketing was less sharp, and the whole prize business looked less like a blood sport. I had been publishing for over 20 years and although the reviewers had been consistently kind, I had never sold in great numbers.

But moments after I took my cheque from the hands of the Man Booker judges, an ally approached me, stabbing at an electronic device in her hand: “I’ve just checked Amazon – you’re number one – you’re outselling Dan Brown.” Amazon itself – with its rating system, its sales charts, its reader reviews – feels like part of the prize industry, part of the process of constantly ranking and categorising authors, and ranking and categorising them in the most public way. To survive the scrutiny you must understand that (much as you love winning them) prizes are not, or not necessarily, a judgment on the literary merit of your work. Winners emerge by negotiation and compromise. Awards have their political aspects, and juries like to demonstrate independence of mind; sometimes a book which has taken one major award is covertly excluded from consideration for others. Sometimes the judges are actors or politicians who harbour a wish to write fiction themselves – if, of course, they had the time. I have sat on juries where the clashing of celebrity egos drowned out the whispers from the pages surveyed, and the experience has been so unfair and miserable that I have said to myself “never again”.

But you do learn from being a judge that, in a literary sense, some verdicts matter and some don’t. Sometimes the pressure on judges seems intolerable. When I was a Booker judge myself, back in 1990, we read about 105 books. Last year there were 132. I was lucky enough to serve under a businesslike chairman, Sir Denis Forman, a man who knew how to run a meeting from his time at Granada Television. All the same, I remember the final judging session as one of the great ordeals of my life. So much depended on it, for the winners and the losers. I was already nettled by the leaking of tittle-tattle and misinformation to journalists. It came from the administration, I think, not the judges. “Just mischief,” someone suggested, smiling. I was taking it too seriously, I suppose: as if it were a capital trial and we were going to hang five authors and let one escape. But we were, it seemed to me, giving one author a life – a different life.

There was an element of bathos when the winner, A S Byatt, said that she would use the money to build a swimming pool at her second home. At times of crisis – and winning this prize is a crisis – people say the most extraordinary things. I seem to recall one novelist saying more humbly that his winner’s cheque would pay for an extra bathroom. For years I dreamt of pursuing the watery theme: of flourishing my £50,000 with a cry of, “At last, I see my way to an indoor lavatory.” I didn’t say it, of course. Jokes are wasted at prize time. I had never been shortlisted for the Booker until the year of my win, but I looked at those who were already winners with a narrow eye; I read their books and searched their faces. But whether it has changed their lives as it has changed mine is a mystery to me. The smiling repression – so many years of congratulating others, so many trudges home, so many taxis, guinea pigs; the sheer hypocrisy of pretending you don’t mind losing. These take their toll.

You become a worse person, though not necessarily a worse writer, while you’re waiting for your luck to turn. When finally last year at the Guildhall in London, after an evening of dining and of speeches that, it seemed to me, were excruciatingly prolonged, when finally the moment came and I heard the name of a book and that book was mine, I jumped out of my chair as if I had been shot out of a catapult, and what I felt was primitive, savage glee. You have to win the Man Booker at the right time, pious folk tell you. You have to win it for the right book, runs the received wisdom. Balderdash, said my heart; but it used a stronger, shorter word. You just have to win it, right now. Hand it over. It’s been long enough. The writer inside you feels no sense of entitlement. She – or it – judges a work by internal standards that are hard to communicate or define. The “author”, the professional who is in the prose business, has worldly concerns. You know the first question from the press will be: “What will you do with the money?” The truth was that I would use it to reduce my mortgage.

But that reply would by no means do, and I felt obliged to say: “Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.” The public don’t like to think of authors as citizens who pay their debts. They like to think of them living lives of fabulous dissipation in warm climates, at someone else’s expense. The public want to regard you as being set apart, with some quirk of brain function or some inbuilt moral freakishness that would explain everything, if only you would acknowledge it. They want to know, what is the stimulus to your creativity? What makes you write? Sometimes you want to shrug and say, it’s my job. You don’t ask a plumber, what makes you plumb? You understand he does it to get his living. You don’t draw him aside and say: “Actually, I plumb a bit myself, would you take a look at this loo I fitted? All my friends say it’s rather good.” But it’s little use insisting that writing is an ordinary job; you’d be lying. Readers understand that something strange is going on when a successful work of fiction is created – something that, annoyingly, defies being cast into words.

If we poke the author with a stick for long enough, hard enough, he’ll crack and show us the secret, which perhaps he doesn’t know himself. We have to catch him when he’s vulnerable – and he is never more vulnerable than when someone has caught him on a public platform and given him a big cheque. He may be grinning from ear to ear, but he’s swarming with existential doubts. “You are currently the top writer in the world,” an interviewer said to me on Booker night. “It’s not the Olympics,” I said, aghast. The progress of the heart – which is what your writing is – cannot be measured like the progress of your feet on a racetrack. And yet, you can’t deny, it has been. On a particular night in October, you’ve got your nose ahead of JM Coetzee. I have found I can live with the contradictions. I think there is one kind of writer who might be scalped and skinned by the demands the prize imposes, and that is the writer who finds public performance difficult, who has failed to create a persona he can send out to do the show.

As people often observe, there is no reason why skill in writing and skill in platform performance would go together; I have witnessed some horrible scenes in the back rooms of bookshops, as writers sweat and stutter and suffer a mini-breakdown before going out to face 20 people, some of whom have wandered in because they saw a light, some of whom have manuscript-shaped parcels under their seats, some of whom have never heard of you before tonight, and have come on purpose to tell you so. Generally, it seems to me, authors are better at presenting themselves than they were 10 years ago. Festivals flourish, we get more practice; you could give a reading somewhere every week of the year if you liked. For me, the transition between desk and platform seems natural enough. I think of writing fiction as a sort of condensed version of acting and each book as a vast overblown play. You impersonate your characters intensively, you live inside their skins, wear their clothes and stamp or mince through life in their shoes; you breathe in their air. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Of course she is. Who else could she be?

Some nine months on, I can report that the Man Booker has done me nothing but good. Because I am in the middle of a project – my next book is the sequel to the prize-winner – it has not destabilised me, just delayed me. The delay is worthwhile, because the prize has helped me find publishers in 30 countries. It has made my sales soar and hugely boosted my royalties. In doing these things it has cut me free. For the next few years at least, I can write what I like, just as I could before I was ever in print. I wrote for 12 years before I published anything, and in those years I felt a recklessness, a hungry desire, a gnawing expectation, that I lost when I became a jobbing professional who would tap you out a quick 800 words, to a deadline, on almost anything you liked. It is hard to make a good income from fiction alone, but now perhaps I can do it. I haven’t lived in a glamorous whirl since I won the prize. I could have taken up any number of invitations to festivals abroad, but only if I ditched the commitments at home that were already in my diary.

I am, anyway, a bit world-weary and more than a bit ill, and intensely interested in the next thing I will write. Even when you are taking your bow, lapping up applause, you do know this brute fact: that you are only as good as your next sentence. You might wake up tomorrow and not be able to do it. The process itself will not fail you. But your nerve might fail. On the evening of the Man Booker, if you are a shortlisted candidate, you are told that if you win you will be speaking live on air within a moment or two, and that after a long and late night you must be up early for breakfast TV, and that you will be talk-talk-talking into the middle of next week, to an overlapping series of interviewers. You must be ready, poised; so everyone is given a copy of the winner’s schedule to tuck away in their pocket or bag. So, for some hours, no one is the winner and you are all the winner.

I already had plans for my week should I lose, and as I waited, watching the TV cameras manoeuvre in the run-up to the chairman’s speech, I split neatly into two component parts: one for schedule a, one for schedule b. All such decisions are narrow ones. You win by a squeak or you lose. Your life changes or it doesn’t. There is really no cause for self-congratulation: no time, either. You do not know until the moment you know; or at least, no wash of rumour reached me, lapping towards the stage from the back of the hall. So I wonder what happened to the woman on schedule b, the one with the sinking heart and the sad loser’s smile? I can’t help worrying she’s escaped and she’s out there by night, in the chill of last autumn, wandering the city streets in a most inappropriate gold dress. Wolf Hall is out in paperback. The shortlist for the 2010 Man Booker prize is announced on Tuesday, the winner on October 12 This is an extract from 'Eyes on the Prize' from the Autumn issue of Intelligent Life magazine, out now.

( Copyright The Economist Newspaper Limited, London (2010) On Hilary Mantel’s Booker Win - The New Yorker On Hilary Mantel’s Booker Win By October 17, 2012 Yesterday evening, Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize for “Bring Up the Bodies,” a historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, a top advisor to Henry VIII. This was proof that the Booker juries judge books on their merits alone, because Mantel won the same prize for “Wolf Hall,” the first book in her Cromwell trilogy, in 2009. She is only the third writer and the first British writer to win the prize twice, and, because she is one of the finest writers of English sentences alive, she richly deserves it. But that is not the only reason she does. Most writers’ books bear a strong resemblance to one another, either because the writer can only write one way, or only wants to write one way, or is afraid that if he tries to write another way he will lose the audience that he won with his previous books (this fear is well founded). Mantel (whom I profiled for the magazine) reinvents herself every time. She pushes herself harder.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to produce a second “Wolf Hall”—it was a sequel, after all, nobody would have faulted her for it, and everyone who loved “Wolf Hall” would have been happy—but she didn’t. “Bring Up the Bodies” is startlingly different. “Wolf Hall” is an old-fashioned novel in the best sense, with all the richness, expansiveness, and depth that the term suggests. It spans more than thirty years and much of Cromwell’s life, leading him from wretched childhood to potent middle age. It describes enormous historical shifts (the ascent of Martin Luther, the severing of England from the Roman Catholic church, the coming of the English Bible) and characters on a heroic scale (Saint Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey). It evokes what Mantel calls an “occult history of Britain”—an elegiac collage of British lore that thickens the novel and makes it a story not just of one historical moment but a new creation myth of the island of Britain. “Bring Up the Bodies,” on the other hand, is almost a play.

Many of Mantel’s books tend toward this form—her dialogue is superb, and she often seems to prefer it to exposition—but “Bring Up the Bodies” goes perhaps furthest in this direction. Mercilessly, without regard for anything but her own aesthetic, she strips away much of what was so striking about “Wolf Hall.” Gone is the expansiveness—“Bring Up the Bodies” takes place over less than a year, and is paced with such thrilling relentlessness that it reads almost as though it is taking place in real time. Gone, the character development—here Cromwell is at the peak of his power and skill, a flawless litigating machine. And gone, the epic mood, subject, and scale of the first book: “Bring Up the Bodies” is partly a story of personal revenge (Cromwell’s, against the people who insulted his beloved mentor, Wolsey), but mostly it is a series of savage interrogations, all the more chilling because their fearsome brilliance is directed to so paltry a purpose—allowing Henry VIII to cast off wife two for wife three.

These are, as my colleague James Wood said in our podcast on Mantel last week , some of the most terrifying literary interrogations ever written, worse even than O’Brien’s interrogation of Winston Smith in “1984,” which everyone remembers vividly decades after reading it. They are verbal brutality pared down to its essence, and they are that because Mantel, with astonishing rigor, took everything out of this novel that made the earlier one great. When she started to write about Cromwell, Mantel intended to write just one book. As “Wolf Hall” got longer and longer, she realized that it needed to be two. Then one day she wrote the scene, in “Bring Up the Bodies,” in which Anne Boleyn was executed. Her husband, Gerald, was sitting in the next room, leaving her alone. She came in and stood next to him, looking very disturbed and a little frightened. She was shaking. He gave her a hug and asked her what was the matter. She said that she didn’t know what she’d just done. She needed help. She was bewildered.

She thought that she might have just finished her book without intending to, and this feeling was frightening somehow, as though in executing Anne she had executed the book as well. She needed him to read it from the beginning, to see if she had finished it or killed it. Last night, she received an answer. Photograph by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello. Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. Booker prize goes to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall | Books | The Guardian Booker prize goes to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel wins the 2009 Booker prize for her fictionalised life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall Tuesday 6 October 2009 16.48 EDT First published on Tuesday 6 October 2009 16.48 EDT Close This article is 7 years old She was the bookies' favourite, the people's favourite and tonight Hilary Mantel became the judges' favourite as Wolf Hall, her vividly told tale of Tudor intrigue, emerged triumphant at the Man Booker prize.

By the end of their three-hour meeting today the Booker judges were split three-two in favour of Mantel's fly-on-the-wall account of the life of Henry VIII's fixer, Thomas Cromwell. Although it was not a unanimous decision, Jim Naughtie, the BBC broadcaster who chaired this year's judging panel, said all five were happy to name it the winner. He said: "Our decision was based on the sheer bigness of the book, the boldness of its narrative and scene-setting, the gleam that there is in its detail." Mantel, after winning the prize, said: "I hesitated for such a long time before beginning to write this book, actually for about 20 years." Mantel, who said she wanted to capture the imagination of readers generally, thanked the book trade for their support. She said that if winning the Booker Prize was like being in a train crash "at this moment I am happily flying through the air". Naughtie praised the scale and ambition of the novel: "We all felt there were paragraphs, passages, pages that we wanted to go back and read again. We have a book which, as a piece of creative fiction, is extraordinary in its technique, its confidence.

Once you are in to it, you are in to it – you don't stop." Wolf Hall had been one of the hottest favourites in years with, according to Ladbrokes, 80% of all bets on the winner. Some thought being so heavily backed might even count against it, as no bookmakers' favourite had won since Yann Martel's The Life of Pi in 2002. Mantel is one of the most highly regarded and under-rewarded – in terms of prizes – novelists working in Britain today, and it surprised many that this was her first time on the Booker shortlist. She admitted to the Guardian this week that winning "would provide freedom from having to win the Booker". The novelist was given the trophy at London's Guildhall, along with a £50,000 cheque and a guaranteed leap in worldwide sales. Mantel joked that she would spend it on "sex, drugs and rock and roll. "To be a little less stupid, living, I think. It buys time.

That's what an author wants." She described the award as "earnings", saying it may be a cold way to look at it "but cost out what an author earns per hour, it's far, far less than the minimum wage ... It must pay the mortgage, as authors have to do." Her victory is all the more impressive because this year's shortlist was widely seen as one of the strongest in years and included former winners JM Coetzee and AS Byatt. Naughtie said the "ridiculous" odds of 16-1 originally given to Wolf Hall when the longlist was announced probably led to the betting bonanza. After the shortlist was announced the novel became easily the fastest seller, accounting for 45% of all the shortlisted books' sales, according to Amazon, although Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger has sold more overall. Naughtie said the voting process had been spirited and friendly. "There was no blood on the carpet. We parted good friends. When we gathered this morning none of us knew which book was going to win," he said.

"I think we all felt exhausted at the end of the process but there was real feeling that we had found a book that was worthy of the prize." Mantel said she has started work on the sequel to Wolf Hall, which will be titled The Mirror And The Light. "What I have got at the moment is a huge box of notes," she added. All the shortlisted authors were at the ceremony apart from Coetzee, who has won two Bookers. If Byatt had won, she would have become only the third double winner, along with Coetzee and Peter Carey. The other shortlisted novelists were Waters, Simon Mawer for The Glass Room and Adam Foulds for The Quickening Maze. Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ wins again - TODAY.com Today.com Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ wins again 2010-03-12T15:03:54.000Z comment () Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall," winner last year of the Man Booker Prize in London, was honored Thursday night on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. The novel, set in the age of King Henry VIII, won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for fiction.

It's a compassionate narrative of royal adviser Thomas Cromwell, a leading enforcer of the English Reformation and a rival of Sir Thomas More. Mantel was not in attendance at Thursday's ceremony but issued a statement saying that she was working on a sequel and that the award is "the best possible encouragement." Three British authors were winners Thursday: Mantel, historian Richard Holmes for general nonfiction and 92-year-old editor Diane Athill for autobiography. Holmes was cited for his highly regarded study of the crossed stars of science and poetry, "The Age of Wonder." Blake Bailey's "Cheever: A Life," a thorough account of the late novelist John Cheever, was the biography winner, and Athill won for "Somewhere Towards the End," an atheist's spirited reflection on old age. Rae Armantrout's "Versed" was cited for poetry, while the prize for criticism went to Eula Biss' essays on American life and culture, "Notes from No Man's Land." Biss, noting that her book was a work of criticism released by a small publisher, Graywolf Press, said she didn't worry too much about what she wrote because she assumed no one would read it.

"You took away my comfort," she joked. Honorary awards were given to Joyce Carol Oates for lifetime achievement and to New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella for excellence in reviewing. The NBCC awards were established in 1974. No cash prizes are given. Historical Novel About Henry VIII Wins Booker Prize - The New York Times The New York Times Books |Novel About Henry VIII Wins Booker Prize Search Continue reading the main story Hilary Mantel won the 41st annual Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night for “Wolf Hall,” a historical novel about Henry VIII’s court centered on the king’s adviser, Thomas Cromwell. In the run-up to Tuesday’s ceremony at the Guildhall in London, Ms. Mantel, 57, was the overwhelming favorite, with the bookmakers William Hill giving “Wolf Hall” odds of 10-11, the shortest odds ever for a nominee. Ms. Mantel beat out the literary lions J. M. Coetzee and A. S. Byatt, both previous winners of the prize, and deprived Mr. Coetzee of the chance to become a three-time winner of the award.

She was the first favorite to win since Yann Martel won for “Life of Pi” in 2002. Accepting the award, Ms. Mantel said, “I had to interest the historians, I had to amuse the jaded palate of the critical establishment and most of all I had to capture the imagination of the general reader.” James Naughtie, a BBC broadcaster who led the panel of judges, described “Wolf Hall” as “a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century,” praising it for the way it “probes the mysteries of power by examining and describing the meticulous dealings in Henry VIII’s court, revealing in thrilling prose how politics and history is made by men and women.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Mr. Naughtie revealed that the decision was not unanimous and that the five-judge panel was split this year 3 to 2 in favor of “Wolf Hall.” In a report on the Web site of the Guardian newspaper, guardian.co.uk, Mr.

Naughtie said the panel’s decision “was based on the sheer bigness of the book, the boldness of its narrative and scene-setting, the gleam that there is in its detail.” The Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, is conferred every year to a novel written by an author from Britain, Ireland or the Commonwealth nations. The award comes with a check for about $80,000 and usually results in a bump in sales. Last year’s winner, “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga, for example, has sold 236,000 copies in paperback in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales. “The Gathering” by Anne Enright, which won in 2007, has sold 300,000 paperback copies. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy Ms. Mantel, who has written 10 novels, a collection of short stories and a memoir, spent five years writing “Wolf Hall” and is already working on a sequel.

This was her first time being nominated for the Booker Prize. “Wolf Hall,” published by Fourth Estate in Britain and Henry Holt & Company in the United States, was widely praised among reviewers. Writing in The New York Times on Monday, Janet Maslin said the book’s “main characters are scorchingly well rendered,” adding that “their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words.” And in The Sunday Telegraph of London, Lucy Hughes-Hallett wrote that Ms. Mantel “makes that world at once so concrete you can smell the rain-drenched wool cloaks and feel the sharp fibers of the rushes underfoot.” The Booker Prize was perhaps most notable this year for its lack of controversy. In previous years, details of the judges’ deliberations have been catnip for London’s literary society and the shortlists have often been scrutinized as much for who is left off as for who is included. This year, several heavyweights — and former winners — were left off the long list of finalists, but that was largely viewed as a measure of the strength of the year’s offerings in literary fiction.

The shortlist of finalists for the award were Ms. Byatt for “The Children’s Book,” ; Mr. Coetzee for “Summertime,” Adam Foulds for “The Quickening Maze,” Simon Mawer for “The Glass Room,” and Sarah Waters for “The Little Stranger.” A version of this article appears in print on October 7, 2009, on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Novel Set in Henry VIII’s Court Wins the Booker Prize. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe The Prize Writers The Prize Writers 2009 - Hilary Mantel Born: 6 July 1952, Glossop, Derbyshire Author's quote: "Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own." Field: Fiction Books Written By Hilary Mantel About Hilary Mantel Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, born 6 July 1952), is an English writer whose work ranges in subject from personal memoir and short story to historical fiction and essay. She has twice been awarded the Booker Prize.

She won her first Booker Prize for the 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII. She won her second Booker Prize for the 2012 novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Mantel was the first woman to receive the award twice, following in the footsteps of J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey and J. G. Farrell (who posthumously won the Lost Man Booker Prize). The third installment to the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is set to be published in 2015. Hilary Mary Thompson was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, the eldest of three children and raised in the mill village of Hadfield. She attended St Charles local Roman Catholic primary school. Her parents, Margaret (née Foster) and Henry Thompson, both of Irish descent, were also born in England. Her parents separated and she did not see her father after age eleven.

The family minus her father, but with Jack Mantel (1932-1995) who by now had moved in with them, relocated to Romiley, Cheshire, and Jack became her unofficial stepfather. She took her de facto stepfather's surname legally. She has explored her family background, the mainspring of much of her fiction, in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003). She lost her religious faith at age 12 and says this left a permanent mark on her. She attended Harrytown Convent in Romiley, Cheshire. In 1970, she began her studies at the London School of Economics to read law. She transferred to the University of Sheffield and graduated as Bachelor of Jurisprudence in 1973. During her university years, she was a socialist. Her first novel, Every Day is Mother's Day, was published in 1985, and its sequel, Vacant Possession, a year later.

Her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), drew on her first-hand experience in Saudi Arabia, uses a threatening clash of values between the neighbours in a city apartment block to explore the tensions between Muslim culture and the liberal West. Her Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize-winning novel Fludd is set in 1956 in a fictitious northern village called Fetherhoughton, centring on a Roman Catholic church and a convent. A mysterious stranger brings about transformations in the lives of those around him. A Place of Greater Safety (1992) won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, for which her two previous books had been shortlisted. A long and historically accurate novel, it traces the career of three French revolutionaries, Danton, Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, from childhood to their early deaths during the Reign of Terror of 1794. A Change of Climate (1994), set in rural Norfolk, explores the lives of Ralph and Anna Eldred, as they raise their four children and devote their lives to charity.

It includes chapters about their early-married life as missionaries in South Africa, when they were imprisoned and deported to Bechuanaland, and the tragedy that occurred there. An Experiment in Love (1996), which won the Hawthornden Prize, takes place over two university terms in 1970. It follows the progress of three girls – two friends and one enemy – as they leave home and attend university in London. Margaret Thatcher makes a cameo appearance in this novel, which explores women's appetites and ambitions, and suggests how they are often thwarted. Though Mantel has used material from her own life, it is not an autobiographical novel. Her next book, The Giant, O'Brien (1998), is set in the 1780s, and is based on the true story of Charles O'Brien or Byrne. He came to London to earn money by displaying himself as a freak. His bones hang today in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. The novel treats O'Brien and his antagonist, the Scots surgeon John Hunter, less as characters in history than as mythic protagonists in a dark and violent fairytale, necessary casualties of the Age of Enlightenment.

She adapted the book for BBC Radio 4, in a play starring Alex Norton (as Hunter) and Frances Tomelty. In 2003, Mantel published her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, which won the MIND 'Book of the Year' award. That same year she brought out a collection of short stories, Learning To Talk. All the stories deal with childhood and, taken together, the books show how the events of a life are mediated as fiction. Her 2005 novel, Beyond Black, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Set in the years around the second millennium, it features a professional medium, Alison Hart, whose calm and jolly exterior conceals grotesque psychic damage. She trails around with her a troupe of 'fiends', who are invisible but always on the verge of becoming flesh. The long novel Wolf Hall, about Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell, was published in 2009 to critical acclaim. The book won that year's Man Booker Prize and, upon winning the award, Mantel said, "I can tell you at this moment I am happily flying through the air.

The sequel to Wolf Hall, called Bring Up the Bodies, was published in May 2012 to wide acclaim. It won the 2012 Costa Book of the Year and the 2012 Man Booker Prize; Mantel thus became the first British writer and the first woman to win the Man Booker Prize more than once. Mantel is working on the third novel of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, called The Mirror and the Light. The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher - Hilary Mantel By Amelia Gremelspacher Each of these stories combines Mantel's trademark elegant turns of phrasing and her sly, bleak humor. Narrators regard the world with a jaundiced eye. Young or old, they have been jaded by the adults in their world whose incontinent views of right and wrong have skewed their perceptions. Readers of "Wolf Hall" may be startled by the wry wit on display, but Mantel has written in this vein before: notably "Beyond Black". My perverse favorite is "Comma" in which two marginally accepted children on the fringes of society watch a wealthy home for glimpses of a child with severe birth defects who appears to be a "comma".

The physical metaphor is taken in a arc of brilliant writing until one of the girls come "full stop." All of these stories bear these twists, subtle and otherwise, of the observed judging those at the same margins as themselves. I would recommend this book not only to lovers of the short story, but any person fond of fine writing. The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher - Hilary Mantel By Stephen T. Hopkins While I loved reading Hilary Mantel's long and intricate historical novels, I didn't know what to expect from a collection of ten short stories titled after one of them, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. A few pages in, I had the image: here's Mantel tossing off great writing as a sweet break from her longer writing. I found my eyes bulging during some of these stories, as I chuckled my way through others. I'm more impressed than ever at her versatility and the breadth of her writing skills. Any fan of short fiction will find a lot to enjoy in this collection, and book lovers who attend author readings will laugh at what that can be like from this author's hilarious point of view. Wolf Hall | novel by Mantel | Britannica.com novel by Mantel THIS IS A DIRECTORY PAGE.

Britannica does not currently have an article on this topic. British writer Hilary Mantel won the 2009 Man Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall, a retelling of the life of Henry VIII adviser Thomas Cromwell. Alastair Grant/AP Learn about this topic in these articles: in Hilary Mantel A voluminous fictional narrative depicting the rise of Thomas Cromwell to become the principal adviser to King Henry VIII of England, Wolf Hall (2009) was lauded for its impressive scope and complex portrayal of its subject. It was honoured with the Booker Prize, and it became an international best seller. A sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012),...

Question: Hilary Mantel won the 2009 Man Booker Prize with which novel?
Answer: WOLF HALL